‘One
day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form
in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are
half-asleep, ‘Hammer your thoughts into unity’.
For days I could think of nothing else and for years I tested all I did
by that sentence [...]” William Butler Yeats (cited in Frank Tuohy, Yeats,
1976, p.51 )
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goals and themes of FS301
(more than can be met in the course of one or even two semesters; hence we will adapt to the immediate needs of students in the course.)
- “to create a sense of place” for freshmen (Carnegie), esp. the campus as an alma mater, a second home.
- expand our sense of place as querencia, inscape, instress, genius loci, etc.
- personal sense of place: road map
- sense of place in nature
- home as sense of place
- school as sense of place
- university as a sense of place: comparing U.T. to Oxford, the Sorbonne, Salamanca, etc.
- sense of place in geography and culture: Austin, Texas, USA, as compared to Europe
- sense of place in history: Hellenism vs. Hebraism, pastoral vs. urban, Greco-Roman vs. Gothic, modernism vs. antimodernism
- sense of infinite space
- one’s ideal place
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- to focus on time as embodied in place (fossils in Waller Creek, griffins in Littlefield House), to expand our consciousness of time to the origins of the planet and life on the planet, to integrate the meaning of the end of time for the body (death) and for a species (extinction) and to explore alternatives to consciousness of linear time
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- to focus on personal presence (ghosts, genius loci) as embodied in place, such as Joe Jones, Frank Dobie, and the students of 1969 and others in Waller Creek, and all the ghosts inhabiting the Harry Ransom Center, i.e. to give some sense of the social as well as environmental history of this campus
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- to define our college experience,especially by comparing it to that of others unlike ourselves
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- to explore multiple intelligences, the right as well as the left side of the brain, experiential or discovery learning (as in science experiments and the Moore method in math and the Baird Freshman English course in the humanities ) vs. vocational training, via guided imagery, the sympathetic imagination (extended even to animals and plants)
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- to improve writing: motivation (fear vs. love), creativity (vs. writer’s block), planning, concentration, polishing vs. procrastination; learning the new “writing” of multimedia and the internet, learning the relation of writing to drawing and the visual arts; understanding writing as the product of collaboration as well as isolation
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- to explore the relation of the verbal to the visual arts and rhetorics-- to architecture, landscape architecture, sculpture, murals, paintings, drawings – and to music, especially popular music: Van Morrison, John Denver, Kate Bush, Pat Benatar, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, etc.
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- to improve reading: expand sense of reading to whole world as text (semiotics), develop reader response journals integrating right as well as left brain,
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- to improve speaking in discussion and before groups, presentations and acting
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- to improve listening, concentration, and the sympathetic imagination
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- to know oneself, one’s strengths and weaknesses in learning, writing, reading, speaking, listening
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